South African Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said the health authorities are planning to administer coronavirus vaccines to up to 200,000 people a day beginning around May, reported News 24.
According to a report published in the Sunday Times newspaper on Sunday, the vaccination plan is based on the expected arrival of the first batch of 2.8 million Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine doses at the end of April. The report says that more than 2,000 vaccination sites will be set up across the country where the doses would be administered.
“During the mass vaccination phases we will need to be targeting about 200,000 people per day nationally, with variations across provinces because of the differing concentrations of population,” Mkhize told the newspaper.
Notably, South Africa has been slow to secure vaccines, with just over 230,000 people, mainly frontline health workers, inoculated so far. Shortages of vaccine doses threaten to upend the South African government’s plans to vaccinate two-thirds of a population of about 60 million people this year.
After stopping the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine in February, South Africa started inoculating healthcare workers with Johnson & Johnson shots. The vaccine was suspended after a study found that it failed to prevent mild and moderate cases of the coronavirus variant that became dominant in the country at the end of the year.
The government previously said it had secured 20 million doses of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in bilateral negotiations, with deliveries ramping up from the second quarter of the year.
On Saturday, the South African health minister said the country has confirmed 1.54 million coronavirus infections so far, the most in Africa and more than 52,000 of those who were diagnosed with the disease have died.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa crossed 4,167,350 as of Saturday evening, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said.
